November 7, 2007

The Anti-Neocon FervorParsing the new political discourseby James Kirchick6 November 2007

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-06jk.html

(excerpt)The term "neoconservatism" has undergone a number of shifts in meaning.It was coined in 1973 by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington toderide liberal thinkers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer,who had begun to criticize the welfare state’s excesses. By the 1980s,its meaning expanded to include a small group of former liberal intellectualswho hewed to a strong anti-Soviet line and had defected from the DemocraticParty to support Ronald Reagan. They were motivated in part by an increasedawareness of, and distinctive moral clarity about, human rights in internationalaffairs, a worthy tradition whose liberal incarnation found embodiment infigures such as Senator Scoop Jackson, labor leaders George Meaney,Lane Kirkland, and Al Shanker, and intellectuals Bayard Rustin and MichaelWalzer. None of these people held traditionally movement conservative viewson economics or social issues far from it; some of them were outright socialists.Neoconservatives had not been content with the détente policies of Richard Nixon,because they wanted not to coexist with communism, but to end it...a moreambitious goal that Reagan shared.

After September 11, the "neocon" label, which had fallen into disuse, cameback into vogue as a way to categorize the intellectual godfathers behindthe Bush Doctrine, which of course has advocated both military responsesto terrorist threats and promoting liberty around the world via "regime change"(not all necessarily through military means). According to the leftist narrative,the neocons got us into the Iraq war...never mind the widespread assumptionamong intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did haveWMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinionleaders supported the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc.

By now, "neocon" has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not justthose who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyonewho merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion tonational security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran,Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping ofterrorist groups around the world. The chief purpose of this emergent rhetoricalstyle is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attainnuclear weapons, even if it requires war.